Homemade Vegan Sour Cream

Sometimes you need a little sour cream for stuff. Like, baking a coffee cake or making pierogi dough.

There are some vegan sour cream choices available such as Tofutti brand (of which I’ve used their cream cheese with success in frosting recipes), but I am kind of all about the homemade everything lately so I’ve been dying to find something I can make to replace sour cream in recipes.

As a brief aside about Tofutti products, I did some research again on their site and noticed that they are extra careful about stating that they don’t claim their products are gluten-free because of potential trace elements of gluten in grain alcohol. This is a tad worrisome, isn’t it? Are they just being extra careful, to avoid a potential issue later on? I’m curious now.

Anyhow, moving along …

There are quite a few recipes for vegan sour cream that use soft or silken tofu. I am all for using tofu in recipes. I actually quite enjoy eating it. Sometimes though, I get sick of the idea of using soy. (In fact, there are some real reasons why I need to consume less soy in my diet.)

I wanted to find a recipe that used minimal soy or even none.

Then I found my dream recipe. A vegan sour cream using … cashews. You might remember how much I enjoy using cashews and macadamia nuts as creams and cheeses. So, of course, this recipe appealed to me right away.

I whipped up a batch of this right away and decided I really want a Vita-Mix. My blender is okay but I bet a Vita-Mix would have whipped this up into an even creamier state of smooth creamtasticness.

I am blown away by how similar to sour cream this tastes, smells and feels! I’m serious it’s just shocking how closely this resembles real dairy sour cream. Highly impressed.

I haven’t gotten around to the coffee cake just yet. 🙁 You reminded me of it … I’ll add it to the top of my must-make list.

I have used the vegan sour cream in a lot of other applications though – and with excellent results each time. I did put it in my gluten-free and vegan perogy dough and it did the trick!

I think the key for subbing this out with sour cream or yogurt in baking is to make sure the acidity does the right thing to the baked goods. There’s definitely some acidity in this vegan sour cream, so it should do the trick. Also, how liquid-y the mixture is might affect the amount of total liquid in the recipe. If you think yogurt is generally a bit more runny, it might work to add a tiny bit more water or something to get the right look/feel.

I’ll report back when I finally get to the coffee cake recipe. I’d love to hear how your experiment turned out too.

It doesn’t usually last longer than a couple days in our house – because Levi LOVES this stuff. But it can keep in the fridge for up to a week or so. (Going to update the post to include that!) Thanks!

Oh my goodness… I am so excited to try this!!! I was just lamenting over what I will do with my tofu breakfast wraps! “Cashour” Cream and salsa baby! Woo hoo! Tomorrow I pick a bag of cashews and try it out. 😉

Since you probably don’t have a high powered blender I strongly recommend really letting the cashews soak for a long time. Then your regular blender can do the trick of getting the nuts nice and smooth a bit better. I hope you like this. Levi loves it – and you know how much of a nacho hound he is!

Great to hear! I often only soak my cashews in boiling water for an hour or so before blending it, but figured my Vitamix was doing such a great job it wouldn’t matter. Glad to hear it worked with a regular blender too!

The grayish color could be from the cashews. Mine turns out pretty white. If it was too lemony for you, you could always cut back or omit the lemon completely and just rely on the apple cider vinegar to give it the tangy taste.

Oh true, that makes sense the color would come from the cashews. The weird part is when I put water in the container to rinse it out the water turned completely white. Bizarre.. I’m going to try making another batch tonight and leave out the lemon. I plan on making cake batter dip with it and having a lemony taste won’t be very good, haha. Thank you!

I don’t think balsamic vinegar would be a great substitute in this recipe for a couple reasons – mainly the flavor of balsamic is quite distinctive and I’m not sure it’ll give the desired result for the sour cream. Also, the color is so dark it’ll definitely make your sour cream an unpleasant color – grey or brownish.

You could use regular vinegar, but just slightly less and I bet it would be fine. Or what I would do if I didn’t have apple cider vinegar is just substitute it with more lemon juice.

Has anyone used this in any other recipes? My son can not have soy and am trying to find a recipe that can be used as a sub in cooking – like stroganoff. Curious of you used it to make your coffee cake and if so how did it turn out?